Stability is certainly an area that M$ still fails in - although, in fairness, they have improved significantly in the past ten years (remember the old crashing jokes comparing Windows to cars ). Even though M$ doesn't "crash" all that often for me anymore - I notice that things just stop working. For instance, today at work the CD drive just stopped reading discs - it was stuck with one discs information on it and wouldn't read anymore. I had to reboot it and all was well (for the moment).

__________________
And the WORD was made flesh, and dwelt among us. (John 1:14)

It's not monopolized, but the amount of licensing regulations makes it quite prohibitive for the average person to get into - and also hard to get into even if you wanted to do it as a profession (last time I priced it in Ohio, several years ago, I think it was about $250,000 just for a commercial winery - more for distillation).

-- now back to your regularly scheduled sobering debate.

Yes and we in U. S. call that kind of legislations which prevent "average" people of doing things special interests or special favors to couple big families or corporations who have paid election campaigns. In the rest of the world they called it CORRUPTION. On the bright side thanks GOD I live on
the north side of the U.S. and Mexican border so at least the life of my children is not entirely in hands of 40 heartless families.

I find it interesting that someone would say BSD crashes more than Windows. Long ago I tired of people whining about Windows crashing since I don't too often have the issue. XP has crashed, hung, froze, whatever, but not often enough to aggravate me if I have enough memory (unlike this 512Mb notebook I have now).

I'm surprised, maybe shocked, anyone would say BSD crashes more. Since my novice days 3 1/2 years ago, I've never had FreeBSD crash, hang, freeze or anything beyond my own doing. And I'm an experimenter unafraid to "see what happens when I do this". I've had boxes run for months and boxes not crash during lightning storms while all the Windows boxes shutdown.

For me I think it is X11. I have my box set up right now to use gdm (the Gnome display manager), so if X11 exits, the computer reboots. I should get rid of gdm and start the other daemons individually.

It happened to me about a week ago, where I was viewing a page with IE6 in Wine. It froze; I could not get any console windows, and then it just rebooted. I'd bet that was X11. I've had quite some issues with that over the last six months or so, likely because I use dual monitors in Xinerama and the nVidia driver.

FreeBSD -- only on crappy hardware with even crappier hardware support.

Various elements of "Windows" although not usually bringing the entire system down, have occasionally had stability or even GOD awfully stupid behaviors... It's my firm believe that user level software should NEVER be able to crash a system, render it inoperable, or require a reboot to fix.

But on Windows, most things may as well be considered "part of the OS" by nature and marketing. So I count them against it's stability as an integrated system.

OpenBSD, at least hasn't screwed me yet. The machine runs like a well oiled swiss clock from power outage to power outage ;-)

Heh, she still uses IE6 and 'hates' the additional toolbars added by the last update to her anti-virus program. She also has the software multi-tasking / multi-window abilities of MS-DOSes COMMAND.COM ;-)

Me, I ain't used IE beyond the "on need" basis since the Firefox 1.0.x days, although I rarely use Firefox since the 2.0 release, we've had a long relationship as far as the many browsers and I go.

...the number of Windows systems out of a 160-million sample
group hit 90.89% last month, down from 91.13% the month
before. Over the same time period, Mac OS X climbed from
7.83% to 7.94%, and Linux crawled up from 0.68% to 0.8%.

I'd guess the desktop BSDs are about 5% of Linux, but that's a SWAG. No idea about Solaris.

For me I think it is X11. I have my box set up right now to use gdm (the Gnome display manager), so if X11 exits, the computer reboots. I should get rid of gdm and start the other daemons individually.

It happened to me about a week ago, where I was viewing a page with IE6 in Wine. It froze; I could not get any console windows, and then it just rebooted. I'd bet that was X11. I've had quite some issues with that over the last six months or so, likely because I use dual monitors in Xinerama and the nVidia driver.

I refuse to run any login manager. I also stay away from Gnome. Xfce is my playground. I just start it upon login as my normal user via a conditional in my zshrc.

For me I think it is X11. I have my box set up right now to use gdm (the Gnome display manager), so if X11 exits, the computer reboots. I should get rid of gdm and start the other daemons individually.

It happened to me about a week ago, where I was viewing a page with IE6 in Wine. It froze; I could not get any console windows, and then it just rebooted. I'd bet that was X11. I've had quite some issues with that over the last six months or so, likely because I use dual monitors in Xinerama and the nVidia driver.

hm, I just had this too, every time I try to start UnrealEd2 with wine and Xorg just exits (Signal 11).
Used to work fine ...

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UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

Knowing UnrealEd under Windows, I'm _really_ not surprised that it does that ^_^.

Although I do seem to recall something from xscreensaver, whose author is very X-smart.

Quote:

Originally Posted by "xscreensaver FAQ: You crashed my X server! You bas***d!

I'm sorry. But the fact is that an X server crash is, by definition, a bug in the X server.

The rule is that absolutely nothing a client program throws at the X server should make it crash. When an X client does something wrong, the server is supposed to return an error, causing the client to exit. If the server itself goes down, that's a bug in the server. There may also be a bug in the client -- but probably not.

This also goes for DRI, GL, and any vendor- or hardware-specific libraries you might be using. If something in xscreensaver caused your display to freeze, or logged you out, or made your monitor explode, I can pretty much guarantee you that the bug is in your X server or your video driver, and not in xscreensaver.

Try upgrading your X server and video drivers. If that doesn't help, you can try running each display mode in turn until you figure out which one is triggering the X server bug. It is most likely to be one of the GL (3D) screensavers, since those are the ones that actually take advantage of your video hardware. When you figure out which one is causing the crash, you now have a reproducible test case! Congratulations. Please report that to the vendor of your X server and/or your video drivers so that they can fix the problem.

Turning off acceleration in your X server may also make the problem go away, but that will also slow your machine down a lot.

If that still brings you no joy, then I recommend switching to MacOS. I did.

Sure does for me. I never had any issues with XFree. Xorg was fine too until it reached version 7. Thereafter I have all sorts of minor issues, and that is ignoring the xorg/HAL/mouse issues that popped up recently.

Maybe I misattribute the cause -- I've not looked in detail -- but that is what it seems like.

> Sure does for me. I never had any issues with XFree. Xorg was fine too until it reached version 7. Thereafter I have all sorts of minor issues, and that is ignoring the xorg/HAL/mouse issues that popped up recently.

same here. plus, xorg seems to have more issues on freebsd - atleast in my experience.